


Southbound

by Eatsscissors



Category: The Eagle (2011)
Genre: M/M, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-08
Updated: 2011-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatsscissors/pseuds/Eatsscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Originally written for The Eagle kink meme: after the battle with the Seal People, h/c wherein Marcus is the caretaker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Southbound

The lone horse had either wandered off or been stolen by some clever soul hearing the sounds of battle and deciding that its owner was either coming back late or not at all. In either case, it was much too far away by the time that the fighting was done and the bodies had been burned or buried for them to have hope of finding it again, even if Marcus or Esca had had energy for a fight. With the horse went their remaining provisions, leaving them with nothing to trade for more mounts save for their weapons or the eagle itself; Marcus found himself clutching it more tightly to his body at the very thought. His father's former men had been able to spare for them a pair of blankets and enough food to sustain them the rest of the way back south to the wall, but even that had been dearly given. Esca had taken the supplies to carry while Marcus had fashioned a loose sling out of his cloak so that he could carry the eagle against his person while leaving his hands free, for his bad leg was hurting hard and he was staring down the fact that he would likely be leaning on Esca heavily long before they came within sight of Roman faces again. Save for the flesh wound to his arm, Esca was bruised and worn but otherwise uninjured, but Marcus still found himself hesitating to ask anything of a man that he had owned until less than a day before.

Even after twenty years of living among the Britons, Marcus noticed that several of the former centurions were thrown by the way that Esca stared them dead in the eye, the defiant slash of his mouth that Marcus had grown accustomed to over the past several months as Esca had aided with the bodies and then accepted the gifts of food. He might have been smiling slightly as he turned away.

The smile was long gone within a few hours of trudging through the woods towards the south, and Marcus caught himself wishing that he had damned his pride and pushed of his father's former men for warm lodging until the morning, at least. The faint ache that the bad leg always brought with it at the end of a long day, so familiar by now that Marcus almost thought that he wouldn't know what to do if it should disappear just as he wasn't certain what he would do if Esca were gone tomorrow, had become something more like having broken spear-points shoved under the skin with every step, worse than it had been at any point since the wound had been reopened. After a hard stumble nearly sent him down a hill and into one of the lands plentiful and frigid creaks, Marcus stopped them both so that he could cut a stick sturdy enough to bear his weight as his leg increasingly refused to do so. Esca stood a short distance off, light eyes as hooded as they ever were, and didn't offer to help while Marcus tested the stick and found it to his satisfaction. He was free now. It wasn't his duty to aid Marcus any more than it was Marcus's duty to aid him, save for the fact that two men could fight off danger more readily than one. They had still been going no further than a few more wobbly few steps before Marcus felt Esca's hand beneath his arm. "I might have been generous when I said that we were only a few days out from the wall."

It took Marcus a moment or so to recognize that he was being teased, and his lips curved upwards. It was growing dark, anyway, and they would have to be stopping soon enough so that he could get his bad leg near to a fire and hope that the heat would be enough to ease the stiffness out by morning. He leaned more of his weight upon Esca and answered, "We'll get there faster than we found the eagle, at any rate."

The ground was rocky and treacherous among the trees, but Marcus managed well enough with a stick to make up for the bad leg enough so that when Esca dropped out from under him abruptly, Marcus's first thought was that the Seal People had sent out a second hunting party. His hand went instinctively to his sword as he whirled into a crouch beside his fallen former slave, and only then did he realize that there was no betraying knife's handle or arrow's shaft protruding from Esca's back. Esca was kneeling on one knee, hand against his opposite ankle, and though he wasn't speaking, his lips were pressed together tightly enough to become bloodless. The muddied underside of an overturned rock a pace behind spoke to what had happened even if Esca himself remained silent.

"Damn!" Marcus snapped out. He shifted to help and only then realized how quickly he had dropped onto the bad leg. He swore again, this time more creatively and at much greater length. "Is it broken?"

"I don't—" Esca stopped, took a breath, and shook his head before he gave his ankle an experimental wiggle and tried to put his weight onto it. While Marcus couldn't translate the words that came out of Esca's mouth, he had an idea that they would have put his Latin to shame. "No. I can go on."

Marcus snorted; Esca's eyes flew up quickly to his face, gauging the reaction for danger in the way that he had had to know as a slave and the way that Marcus had caught himself doing more than once among the Seal People before he cleared his face again and let out a slow breath. Marcus pretended that it was due to the pain in his ankle. He eased out his bad leg more carefully as he knelt beside Esca, shifting the eagle as he did so that it was not pressing against his ribs quite so hard. "We might have been able to make more ground tonight with three good legs between us, but not with two. Can you get the boot off?"

It turned out that Esca could, but only just, and Marcus thought that they had been only moments away from having to cut the leather away. Esca's skin was already purpling, the joint much larger than it ought to have been. Marcus and Esca hissed between their teeth in time with each other and then shared a quick, startled glance as they realized what they had done.

"You're certain that this isn't broken?" Marcus asked. He started to pull off the sling that carried the eagle and then changed his mind and started cutting several long strips off one of the blankets instead. They would build a fire and make do, just as they had done for all of the months after going beyond the wall. It was clear that Esca wasn't going to be traveling any further tonight, and a day or so more before the eagle saw its home again didn't mean altogether much after a twenty year absence.

"I've felt broken bones before," Esca said quietly. When Marcus looked up from the blanket, Esca matched him with the stare that had nearly driven Marcus mad while they had been among the Seal People and his certainty in Esca's loyalties turned on a breeze. Marcus liked to think that he could read the meanings of Esca's silences now, but there were still moments when he thought that they were strangers as much as they had been when Marcus had first seen him in the arena.

"It's a sprain," Esca went on, pulling his knee up against his chest so that he could study his ankle more closely and grimacing. "I'll be all right by the morning if I wrap it tightly."

"Mmm." Marcus liked to think that he could say more than enough with a hum and a carefully placed look, too. Esca looked surprised for the briefest of moments, and then one corner of his mouth lifted. He had a good smile, and as Marcus ignored Esca's attempts to take the blanket away from him and tend to the ankle himself he was sorry that he had not had an opportunity to see more of it, because it was unlikely to return soon.

Sure enough, Esca made a short sound from between his teeth as Marcus pulled the straps tight against his already purpling skin. His face was blank again when Marcus looked up from the work to make certain that he was all right, but his knuckles were very white as he gripped at the moss.

"I'm sorry," Marcus said, a little surprised by how easily it tumbled from his lips. On the other side of the wall, he never would have thought about apologizing to a slave. If the way that Esca's fingers tightened even further through the moss and twigs was anything to go by, Esca was not entirely certain what the correct response to his former master apologizing for causing him pain was, either. They had no other choice but to make up new customs among themselves.

"It's all right," Esca returned. He tried again to tend to the ankle for himself, but Marcus pushed his hands away and after a beat Esca let him. It was hard to read his face while Marcus was sure that his own was speaking everything, and he pretended that it was the coming evening cold which made him clench and then flex his fingers as he finished and shifted away.

"You'll be able to put more weight on it in the morning," Marcus said, not quite meeting Esca's gaze stare as he began to make the fire. It was a task that he had undertaken often enough even before Esca had been free and there had been far too much work involved in setting up camp each night to leave it all to a slave, but it meant so much more, somehow, now that the easy lines between them had been erased away and new ones not yet drawn. Nor was the bad leg any more pleased with him now than it had been before Esca had fallen, and he leaned upon the walking stick heavily as he gathered enough dry wood to keep them warm through the night. Marcus didn't go far, and he listened carefully to the woods breathing around him before each step. They were still largely alien to Roman ears but, much as he liked to pretend with Esca himself, no longer quite the mystery that they had been once. Marcus paused against the mossy trunk of a tree for a moment and breathed in the particular loamy quality of the air here, thinking that he might understand a bit more why Uncle Aquila had never chosen to go home when his time as a Centurion had been finished, when he hadn't taken a native family as so many did to keep him rooted to the region.

Marcus returned to the campsite only to find that Esca was hobbling back himself, a dripping water skin in one hand. Esca stopped, leaning one hand up against a tree for balance and clearly debating whether it would have been better to simply go thirsty, when he saw that Marcus was watching him. As always, his eyes were shuttered and careful. But not so much as they had been once, Marcus thought, or perhaps he was simply learning Esca, no matter how the languages of the Britons themselves remained stubbornly beyond him. When the moment stretched on for too long, Marcus thought to order Esca to sit before he injured himself further, remembered yet again that Esca was no longer his to casually move about as he wished.

Rather than tell Esca to sit down, unsure if it would be apparent that he did so from concern and not arrogance, Marcus only said, "You'll regret that in the morning."

Esca grunted out something unintelligible and eased himself to the ground, clearly regretting it already. His mouth was an unhappy slash as he stretched his leg out in front of him. "Needed to be done," he said.

"I could have done it." The eagle slipped around in its sling and banged against Marcus's hands as he stretched his bad leg awkwardly out to the side to begin the fire, and Marcus made an impatient noise as he pushed it back. When he glanced up, Esca was smiling one of his ambiguous little smiles.

"If you aren't careful, we'll still be trying to go south on only two good legs in the morning," Esca pointed out. Teasing again. It unsettled Marcus, and he could see in the brief flashes when Esca was truly visible shining out of his eyes that it was disconcerting to him, too, this not knowing where they were supposed to put their feet around each other.

Marcus blew on the little pile of lichen and dry sticks until the flames grew strong enough to feed themselves, added fuel a few pieces at a time until they had a warm blaze. A good thing, as the shadows were already much deeper than the remains of the sunset and bringing with them the limb-stiffening cold. He looked over his shoulders at the undergrowth that he still could not read.

"How soon before the Seal People put together another hunting party?" he asked.

Esca went thoughtful, and for a long moment there was a shadow hanging over his face. Marcus knew that it belonged to the murdered Seal pup. "It will be a few days yet before they realize that their men aren't coming back and send out another party," he said. "We'll be far beyond the wall by then, even traveling injured." The shadow returned, deepened; once back in Roman territory, there was no coming back for him, and they both knew it.

 _I don't need to speak the language of the Britons,_ Marcus thought, watching him. _I speak yours. _He stirred at the fire for a few moments more and then began unpacking the bread and cheese that Guern's people had provided for them.__

"The only way that the Seal People will know that their mission has failed before we're away," Esca said slowly, staring into the fire. It took him a few seconds to realize that Marcus had set out his share of the food near to him and even then turned it over and over again as if he wasn't quite sure what it was before he began to eat. "Is if the Centurions tell them."

Marcus set down his bread as it suddenly tasted dry in his mouth. "They won't," he said. "They were Romans once."

"I know." Esca leaned forward and pushed at the fire with a stick, sending up a brief swirl of sparks that looked alive before they fell back to the earth. Marcus brushed the sting of one from the back of his hand. "No," Esca went on finally, as if reluctant to admit it. "They'll keep the secret."

There was little more to say to that. They finished up their cold meal in a relative silence that reminded Marcus of the way that they had related to each other in the months after the arena and the first weeks north. Marcus banked the fire for the night when they were finished and twitched cloak more tightly about his body, only just then realizing that a good portion of the second blanket had gone towards wrapping up Esca's ankle, and that they would have been fighting hard enough against the cold even if they had been whole. Marcus pushed himself up with the walking stick before he had time to know what he was doing, even if it did take him long enough to walk around the fire and to Esca that he had time to come to his senses, if he was of a mind. Night rather than sullen hatred made Esca's eyes dark as he watched Marcus's progress towards him, but the Marcus still paused at the resemblance, even if the rest of Esca's body didn't echo it. Esca had warmed Marcus with his own body, when it had been too dangerous for a fire. This was no different.

"What are you doing?" Esca asked softly as Marcus settled beside him, threw his own blanket out over the two of them.

"Two legs across two men aren't going to get us to the wall," Marcus said, and shrugged at the sudden awkwardness. It had been easier, when one had belonged to the other and both had known what to do. Esca was rigid as Marcus settled against his back, but neither pushed the other away. The cold already had teeth, and a fire unaccompanied by heavy shelter was doing little to drive it back. Esca flexed his ankle back and forth several times before he relaxed back against Marcus, slowly and by degrees. It had been…it had been a long time since Marcus had desired another person, longer than that since he had acted upon it. He had not touched Esca when Esca had been his slave. It was a flimsy honor, but he had still clung to it. Now that Esca was free, he hardly dared to. "Does it hurt?" he asked.

Esca flexed his ankle back and forth a few more times. If his body had melted backwards to fit more solidly against Marcus's own, he didn't seem to notice it. "It'll hold," he said. Marcus thought that Esca was looking towards the north that was now unwelcome to him, but he could not be sure. Esca murmured something in the cadence of a prayer; Marcus thought that he heard the pup's name mingled in.

"Months in the north, and I still don't understand your language," Marcus said, halfway between amused and frustrated, unsure if he was intruding on a private moment or not.

After a long period of silence in which neither of them grew any closer to sleep, Esca turned to face Marcus. Up close and with the fire at his back, his eyes were very dark, his face nearly unreadable. It hardly mattered when Esca's callused hand moved over Marcus's waist under the blanket and over Marcus's tunic, the way that that same hand clenched but Esca's shoulders relaxed when Marcus shifted his cloak around so that the eagle was resting against his spine and not between them.

"It isn't that difficult," Esca said before he leaned forward and kissed Marcus hard. By the time that they reached the wall four days later on three good legs at best, they were leaning heavily against one another but still walking of one stride.


End file.
